Blockchain Download Time

[Charles Sweeney]

Just out of curiosity, did you need to pay any bandwidth fees and if yes approx how much?

Bandwidth in, i.e. downloading the blockchain, is free.  Data transfer out is free for the first 1GB then $0.09 per GB after that.  Which would be expensive running as a full node if someone downloaded the entire blockchain of 172GB, would be ~ $15 every time (not sure if the transfer is measured in bits or bytes which could make a significant difference).  You wouldn't have any transfer out if you were using it privately, i.e. not accepting incoming requests/connections.  Plus, I believe data transfer between servers on the AWS network is free.

You pay for the storage.  I used 200GB of storage which is charged at $0.116 per GB per month, which equates to $23.20 for the month.

The server instance is one of their lower specs and costs $0.0264 per hour, which equates to (roughly) $19 a month.

The beauty of the AWS instances is that you can start and stop them at any time.  You only pay for what you use.  I have used this one for a few days just to download the blockchain and have a play with it.  In 5 1/2 days it's cost me $3.53 for the instance and around $5 for the storage.  My transfer out was 4.6GB, costing 42 cents (I was only accepting incoming connections for a few hours).  It's on a very good network too, so you should get good connectivity.

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[Charles Sweeney]

If you are solo mining, then your mining software is probably getting its block headers from Bitcoin Core using a getwork API call.  In that case, Bitcoin Core has the transaction selecting algorithm coded into it. I haven't done any mining, so I don't know how configurable that algorithm is.  You do have a few command line options when starting up Bitcoin Core:  

• -blockmaxweight=<n>        Set maximum BIP141 block weight (default: 3000000)
• -blockmaxsize=<n>            Set maximum block size in bytes (default: 750000)
• -blockprioritysize=<n>        Set maximum size of high-priority/low-fee transactions in bytes (default: 0)
• -blockmintxfee=<amt>       Set lowest fee rate (in BTC/kB) for transactions to be included in block creation. (default: 0.00001)

Excellent information again, thank you.  Yes, I did notice those options when playing with the core but didn't fully understand them.  So you could set blockmintxfee to quite a high value to only accept transactions with large fees.  Very interesting, so it's the core that determines what transactions are available to miners, hence no setting for it on BFGMiner.  So if you are using someone else's core, you have to go with their settings.  I suppose this goes back to the early days when every miner would have their own core and the core (bitcoind) did the mining.

[Charles Sweeney]

Assuming there aren't any significant changes to the protocol to allow more on-chain transactions

Why not make a block every minute?  Make the reward 1.25 bitcoin so you still average 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes.  You still get 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes but you get 10 times the number of transactions confirmed.

Why stop at a minute, make a new block every 10 seconds, every second, again with a proportional reward to maintain the average of 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes?  could get a *lot* more transactions processed and more quickly.

[DannyHamilton]

Assuming there aren't any significant changes to the protocol to allow more on-chain transactions

Why not make a block every minute?  Make the reward 1.25 bitcoin so you still average 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes.  You still get 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes but you get 10 times the number of transactions confirmed.

Why stop at a minute, make a new block every 10 seconds, every second, again with a proportional reward to maintain the average of 12.5 bitcoin every 10 minutes?  could get a *lot* more transactions processed and more quickly.

In an altcoin?  Sure.  There are many that have already done so.

In Bitcoin?  That's a hard fork.  To accomplish it you need agreement from an overwhelming majority of all users, merchants, miners, exchanges, wallets, etc.  Getting that many people to agree overwhelmingly on such a change isn't going to happen.  It wasn't even possible to get an overwhelming majority to agree to increase the block size from 1 megabyte to 2 megabytes after 7 years of discussion, debate, argument, and attempts.  Attempting to fork with less than an overwhelming majority results in an altcoin "airdrop" ("Bitcoin Cash" was a hard fork without an overwhelming majority).

I don't think there has been a successful hard fork change to "Bitcoin" since Satoshi left.  I doubt there ever will be.

Here's something to think about...

Is the purchase of a coffee or pizza really an important or risky enough transaction that every full node should be required to store that transaction FOREVER?  If not, then why is it so important that people be able to make such a purchase on-chain?

[Charles Sweeney]

In Bitcoin?  That's a hard fork.

Well, it was worth a shot!  Maybe if it's that, or the end of Bitcoin...

[Memminger]

March 17th 2018.  Just for reference.

Just downloaded the entire blockchain.

Number of blocks: 513,962

Download time: 2 days 3 hours

Size on disk: 172GB

Used an Amazon Web Services EC2 t2.small server instance, running Ubuntu. 2GB memory.  Was struggling a bit, hence the download time.  CPU running at 100% constantly.  Memory was fine but I think more would be needed if running a faster processor.  Not sure of the CPU specs on the t2.small instance but it's one of their lowest performing (and cheapest) instances.

I tried to download it before. It keeps on getting rejected and I just notice that the space isn't enough. An excellent information sir, I'd be very careful with it's infos soon. One question though, did you pay or were there any payments done for you to completely downloaded it? Thank you.

[Charles Sweeney]

One question though, did you pay or were there any payments done for you to completely downloaded it?

You don't pay to download it.  I used an Amazon Web Services server instance for the download.  You need to pay for that.  I posted the costs for it above.  If you're using a PC on your home broadband it won't cost anything.

[khelan]

Really it taking too much time...  I have only 100 kbps download speed show more than week download time. now I'm thinking what will happen whne lockchain reach to 1 TB . What will happen to my pc.

[Charles Sweeney]

Really it taking too much time...  I have only 100 kbps download speed show more than week download time. now I'm thinking what will happen whne lockchain reach to 1 TB . What will happen to my pc.

Just wait a week.  Once it's downloaded, the updates (a new block every 10 minutes) are very small and fast.  If it gets bigger, you'll need to get a bigger disk!

[romon132]

3 Answers. Assuming you have solid 2 megabytes per second download speed, it would take around 20 hours just to download them. In practice, this takes much longer, as your computer will verify every block individually, which takes some time.